Building a More Perfect Union (One Class at a Time)
“So the Supreme Court is saying you’re not in the same ‘debt’ to a big donor if they support your campaign indirectly as if they give to your campaign directly. First do we understand that distinction? Second, do we buy it?”
It’s an early fall morning on the campus of William Peace University and that’s associate professor Caleb Husmann speaking, leading his “Campaigns and Elections” class of 15 undergraduates. Today’s topic is the Supreme Court ruling in the case of “Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission,” which centered on whether an interest group should be allowed to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton just prior to the 2008 election.
In Caleb Husmann’s class, he frequently argues multiple sides of the same issue.
Students watch the film trailer. Then, drawing on what they learned in a previous class, they discuss the different kinds of propaganda the filmmakers used.
The class reviews a number of laws and Supreme Court cases centered on the limits of campaign contributions. Some of the students argue that big money donations can’t help but corrupt politicians and sway their votes. Husmann raises the possibility that companies might give to politicians who already agree with them, not give to change someone’s opinion.
There’s a long discussion of distinctions between free speech by an individual and by a corporation. “If someone is making a decision on behalf of their company to push a political ad,” a young woman in the class argues, “That is an inherent violation of the 1st amendment of everyone who is working for that corporation.”
“Interesting. I see that argument,” says Husmann. As the class continues he argues both sides of various points, to apply concepts they’ve learned in previous classes.
“So if you’re on the Supreme Court, what do you say? Should they [Citizens United] be able to run this [movie] 30 days before the election?” asks Husmann.
“Because I hate Hillary, yes,” says a male student.
“But that can’t be your answer, can it? Your answer needs to be based on a principle. What’s the principle you’re arguing?”
***
It’s hard to blame the student – he’s doing the exact same thing as we older adults in the country are doing right now. We’ve been engaged in a year-long bile-spewing political marathon. We don’t just disagree with our opponents anymore; we hate them. Depending on our political persuasion, we may think all Democrats are elites, freedom-hating communists; or all Republicans are MAGA’ists, racist fascists. We might think new immigrants are doing vital jobs long-time Americans don’t want to and propping up the economy or we might think they are dog-eating, job-stealing murderers destroying the economy.
It's easy to believe any of those blanket generalizations if you never interact with those “others” in your life. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could actually talk with those folks and try to understand how they see the world?
We don’t have many of those conversations as adults. Most of us live in enclaves segregated by race and income level. We go to monochromatic places of worship. We get our news from Internet or TV sources that carefully isolate us from any perspective we won’t agree with. And we’ve been swimming in our own fishbowls for a long time.
But there’s a shot, maybe, for college students to try to understand other perspectives, if they are open in their social and learning lives. Maybe they will emerge from their college years committed to more reason and less hate.
Faculty members can help.
***
A couple of weeks later in the semester, one floor below Husmann’s classroom at William Peace, his wife Beth Kusko, also an associate professor and director of the Criminal Justice, Politial Science and Pre-Law program, is teaching her class on “Law and the Justice System.”
“Allright everybody -- it’s ‘Make a Friend Friday’!” Kusko announces to the 24 students.
Beth Kusko tries to ensure people in her class with different political perspectives learn to work together.
Students count off 1-5, then divide into groups by number to ensure they don’t end up with their closest friends. The new groups end up remarkably mixed by gender and race, and, it becomes obvious later during the discussion, mixed by political perspective and income.
For their first exercise, Kusko asks each group to design a single legal system that “works” for five different categories of people: 1) wealthy geniuses; 2) illiterate and homeless; 3) athletic and “beautiful”; 4) uncoordinated and “ugly”; and 5) poor and sick. Each group shares out their ideas.
Then the groups draw slips. One group is all “poor and sick”; another group is all “wealthy geniuses,” etc. Now that they know which category they are, Kusko asks, what rules would they like to change in the legal systems they just created?
The class exercise replicates an approach developed by the political philosopher John Rawls (the subject of this day’s class), who said we should put aside our personal self-interest in making policy decisions. But the class exercise is also an opportunity for students from different backgrounds and political perspectives to learn how to talk to each other, to learn how to come to a consensus or make compromises, and to try to see the world through the perspective of people who may be quite different from them.
And by having the students do the same thought experiment Rawls did, Kusko is also sending a message that the students have the ability to construct their own world view, even to disagree with really smart people.
“But wait a minute,” says one female student, as Kusko lays out the key premises of Rawls’ theory. “Rawls is trying to make things fairer, but isn’t he actually making things unfair at the same time?”
“Okay, tell me why,” says Kusko.
“Well, some of those people end up working their ass off to get to where they are, but we should just give it to other people who don’t do any work at all? Like, that doesn’t make sense to me. He’s more about equality of outcome than equality of opportunity.”
A male student jumps in: “Yeah, if you work really hard and finally reach the top and then they cut you down, why would you do it?”
“And that’s the critique of Rawls,” says Kusko.
I don’t know what every class member ended up thinking about Rawls’ philosophy, or how it might apply to their lives. I do know that their brains were at work, trying to sort through one of the issues at the heart of our national anger.
In her classes, Kusko wrote me later in an email, “We criticize/praise everyone [we study], regardless of party or ideology or gender or religion or anything.
“All sides of an issue are discussed. To disarm students I try to say something like ‘even if you don’t believe it, what is the argument for/against?’ to try to get them to be analytical rather than personal.”
Husmann adopts a similar teaching style:
“I’ll often argue a variety of viewpoints on the same issue. And try to get students to do the same… my goal is to get them to graduate and not know my political leanings.”
***
There are people who are convinced that college professors, who identify overwhelmingly as Democrats, can’t keep their politics out of the classroom, and are using their classes to insidiously grow future Democrats (if so, they aren’t doing a very good job; the largest study I’ve seen finds that after one year of college, students viewed both liberal and conservative viewpoints more favorably, with slightly more viewing conservative more favorably. Another study found that the majority of college students graduate with the same general political leanings as they enter with*). We don’t need to create new universities that try to raise up young Republicans; we need to applaud and encourage faculty like Husmann and Kusko (they are both registered independents) that are committed to equipping students with the skills to weigh evidence and come to their own conclusions.
Surveys at 8 UNC ssystem schools find most students emerge with no change in their political orientation. Most stay the same; a few get more liberal; not quite as many get more conservative. College may not fundamentally change their orientation, but it can at least teach them to think critically (Source Ryan, et. al 2022).
“I always tell them I’m not here to teach them what to think but how to think – a teacher, not a preacher,” says Kusko. “This is a special time in their lives where they get to figure out what they think about things.”
So here’s my hope for the future: If more of our students in more of the classes at more of our universities can graduate with an ability and commitment to thinking before shouting, there’s a chance the next generation of “we the people” can become less vitriolic. Maybe they can even “form a more perfect union.”
-Leslie
*This question is a rich one that has been much studied As best as I can determine, there is a clear association between having a college degree and exhibiting more liberal views (on cultural issues, not so much on economic issues). But college attendance does not appear to be the cause of those views. Rather it appears that people who choose to go to college arrive more liberal; those who choose not to go skew more conservative (see this study and this one.) This is why the studies I cite in the post look at changes of attitude during college.
Notes:
Elizabeth Kusko bio: https://www.peace.edu/profile/elizabeth-kusko-da/
Caleb Husmann bio: https://www.peace.edu/profile/caleb-husmann-da/
The war to use classrooms for indoctrination:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/desantis-florida-trump-education-politics.html
How much do student political orientations change during college?:
https://fecdsurveyreport.web.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/22160/2022/05/FECD_Report_5-17-22.pdf
The IDEALS study of 7000 college students at 120 colleges found that after one year of college, students had a greater appreciation of both liberal and conversative viewpoints, with slightly more viewing conservatives favorably: https://theconversation.com/does-college-turn-people-into-liberals-90905
The difficulties of indoctrinating students:
Does college cause liberal attitudes?: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10087825/
An international study on impact of college on attitudes: https://academic.oup.com/ijpor/article-abstract/14/2/141/719728
Teaching critical thinking: https://www.edutopia.org/article/teaching-critical-thinking-middle-high-school/